Alfresco
Alfresco is an Enterprise Content Management system.
It is open source.
You can get a commercially supported version, or you can use the community-supported open source version.
This is an amazing opportunity for small enterprises and non-profits to get a document management system that costs tens of thousands for free. THANKS
The community supported version is available as a binary, but I am building it from scratch because (1) I want to learn more about what goes into it and (2) I want a 64 bit version.
As of today the official release is at version 3.2 and the server I am using is Debian 5.0.3. I will be building the community supported version right from the head of the source tree in Subversion.
Overview
Alfresco is a document management system. It creates a repository for documents. It does all the things you expect to support collaboration on documents, including check-in, check-out, version control
Adding documents to the repository:
IMAP (email clients) FTP email WebDAV (web clients like Dreamweaver) CIFS (Windows file shares)
DoCASU
http://docasu.sourceforge.net/productInfo.html
User interface for Alfresco
Web integration
Open Atrium
Collaboration solution based on Drupal.
Drupal
You can create a friendly front end to Alfresco using Drupal. http://drupal.org/
I am not at this stage yet... see http://acquia.com/community/resources/acquia-tv/revitalizing-your-enterprise-intranet-drupal-alfresco-ecm-and-acquia
Search - Apache Lucene for full text search capabilities, also Endeca? Aquia?
Authentication - LDAP, NTLM Good role based access
Some things that might be good in a non-profit via Drupal for community building
- Wiki
- Forums
- Blogging and microblogging
- Rich user profiles
- RSS feeds
- Outreach (public content, mailing list management)
- Comments
- Polls
- Events and calendars
There are several options for integrating Drupal with Alfresco. I think this is the one to look at http://drupal.org/project/cmis_alfresco
Other stuff
- Download/Upload binary content into Alfresco
- CMIS queries
Building an Alfresco server
I want the finished product to be 64 bit so I am building from source. Official page is here: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_SVN_Development_Environment
Step 1 -- Install Debian
Download the netinst image for AMD64 from debian.org (select a mirror near you)
Burn image to a disk, boot from it and start installer.
Suggested partitions; select LVM
/boot 250M / 4GB SWAP 4GB
Select the installer options for file server and web server
Boot system into Debian
Install a few extra packages
apt-get install openssh-server sudo postfix emacs22-nox ntp
Configure ntp to point to your ntp server (I run one on my network, if you don't then the default settings are probably fine.)
Step 2 Install Alfresco prerequisites
Install additional packages required to build and run Alfresco; this installs a big lot of dependencies including the Java jdk.
sudo apt-get install ant tomcat5.5 tomcat5.5-admin tomcat5.5-webapps sudo apt-get install mysql-server subversion sudo apt-get install imagemagick
Add the environment settings for Java and Tomcat to /etc/profile
sudo cat >> /etc/profile <<EOF # Added to support Alfresco export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj" export TOMCAT_HOME="/usr/share/tomcat5.5" export APP_TOMCAT_HOME="/usr/share/tomcat5.5-webapps" EOF
swftools
Build swftools from source; there is no 64-bit binary for this package either. First install more packages need to build swftools
sudo apt-get install libjpeg-progs libfreetype6-dev libjpeg62-dev libungif4-dev
Download, unpack build and install swftools. This will install into /usr/local by default, which is where I want it.
wget http://www.swftools.org/swftools-0.9.0.tar.gz tar xzvf swftools-0.9.0.tar.gz cd swftools-0.9.0 ./configure make sudo make install
Step 3 Build Alfresco
At this point following the build instructions on the official page should be straightforward.
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_SVN_Development_Environment
This is a BIG project, the subversion check out takes a long time. Source tree (before build) is over 900 MB. Here is my first attempt. It failed.
svn co svn://svn.alfresco.com/alfresco/HEAD cd HEAD/root ant build-tomcat
Backing off to the released version. Damn. Baby steps.
Installing the 32-bit version from the installer simply copies all the files into the destination you give it, by default /opt/Alfresco. I put it at /usr/local/Alfresco instead.
Then you still have to configure it to get it to run.
Step 4 Configure Alfresco
Edit /usr/local/Alfresco/alfresco.sh; change @@ALF_HOME@@ to "/usr/local/Alfresco" and comment out the JAVA_HOME line (it's in /etc/profile from above)
